Ru­ral con­fer­ence hosted by bor­ough coun­cil

MEM­BERS of the bor­ough re­cently hosted the fourth an­nual ru­ral con­fer­ence which fo­cussed on cel­e­brat­ing some of the great work that has been de­liv­ered in our ru­ral com­mu­ni­ties over the last three years.

The event at­tracted del­e­gates who rep­re­sented the ru­ral parishes of the bor­ough, along with key part­ners in­clud­ing Le­ices­ter­shire Po­lice, the Ru­ral Com­mu­ni­ties Coun­cil, Mid­lands Ru­ral Hous­ing and Le­ices­ter­shire, Le­ices­ter and Rut­land Re­silience Part­ner­ship.

The day be­gan with a wel­come from Sharon Re­drobe, Chief Ex­ec­u­tive at Twycross Zoo, re­port­ing on progress of their am­bi­tious master plan for the on­go­ing de­vel­op­ment of the flag­ship vis­i­tor at­trac­tion.

Guests also heard from In­spec­tor Emma Maxwell, who took up the Lo­cal Po­lice Unit Com­man­der role ear­lier in the year, re­port­ing on the key chal­lenges, suc­cesses and pri­or­i­ties of ru­ral polic­ing.

The event also pro­vided an op­por­tu­nity to re­ceive feed­back from del­e­gates to help in­form a refreshed Ru­ral Strat­egy for 2019.

Ex­ec­u­tive Mem­ber for Ru­ral Af­fairs at the Bor­ough Coun­cil, Coun­cil­lor Kevin Mor­rell, gave the open­ing ad­dress say­ing: “I am de­lighted to wel­come you to this our fourth an­nual ru­ral con­fer­ence and find it hard to be­lieve our in­au­gu­ral con­fer­ence was three years ago - a re­ally im­por­tant event where I made a com­mit­ment that the Bor­ough Coun­cil would be putting in place our first Ru­ral Strat­egy for the bor­ough, set­ting out the most im­por­tant pri­or­i­ties for our ru­ral com­mu­ni­ties, in­formed by you our Parishes.

“I also promised that this doc­u­ment would not sit on a shelf and be for­got­ten, but would be utilised to de­ter­mine where we are putting re­sources year on year, and reg­u­larly re­viewed to en­sure we con­tinue to be am­bi­tious enough in plan­ning for and de­liv­er­ing on the things that mat­ter most to our ru­ral com­mu­ni­ties, now and in the fu­ture.”

Coun­cil­lor Mor­rell con­cluded by say­ing: “I want to thank all of our Parish Coun­cils, our key part­ners, many are rep­re­sented here to­day and the myr­iad of com­mu­nity vol­un­teers, who col­lec­tively de­liver great work day in day out.”